Germ Experiments Against Blacks Told

The former white-led government tried to develop bacteria that would kill, or make infertile, only black people, the scientist who set up the apartheid regime’s secret poison factory said. Dr. Daan Goosen told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, engaged in unraveling the grim secrets of the apartheid era, that a major focus at the secret laboratory had been the infertility project. “It was not thought to get rid of all the black people, just to curb the birth rate,” he said. The project was set in motion by a message from a source in Europe claiming to have bacteria that could selectively kill “pigmented” people, Goosen told the commission’s hearings on the chemical warfare program of the former regime. But no actual attempts were made to harm blacks as a result of the project.